This one of Clapton's better albums, picking up where August left off. His guitar playing on this shows why he's one of rock's best. The vocals are strong and inspired. He has a great band backing him including Nathan East, Steve Ferrone, and Phil Collins. Most of the songs are hard rock with a few blues rock songs and mellow song or 2. Bad Love, Pretending, Anything For Your Love, and No Alibis are the best songs on this CD. No laid back country-rock here like there was on his late 70's albums.

The title "Journeyman" would appear to be a bit of modesty by an artist who has been a towering figure in rock music for nearly thirty years. And yet it is quite appropriate. Clapton has never seemed entirely comfortable under the glare of the spotlight, and much of his best work has been collaboartive (Cream, Derek and the Dominoes, Blind Faith, etc). How else to explain such Clapton diversions as his time spent as the lead guitarist on Roger Waters's debut solo album ("The Pros and Cons of Hitchiking") and tour?

With "Journeyman," Clapton produced his prototypical album. There are a couple of decent singles written by an outside songwriter ("Pretending" and "No Alibis") a couple of covers of rock and blues standards ("Hound Dog," "Before You Accuse Me") a longer guitar jam ("Breaking Point") and a lot of decent filler material in between. For all his talents as a musician, Clapton has never been a first rate songwriter, and as a result even his best albums tend to be uneven. While "Journeyman" is no exception to that rule, it is still one of his better solo efforts.

But that's not saying too much. I liked this alot when it first came out, but it has not aged terribly well. Most of this is just a little too slick and ready made for FM radio (e.g., "Pretending", "Bad Love"). It's still a heckuva lot better than "Behind The Sun" and the execrable "August".

The biggest problem is that it suffers from cd-itis (the tendancy to pack way too many mediocre tracks onto an album just because they fit onto the cd). Several of the these songs should have been left on the cutting room floor or tacked onto the end and marked as bonus tracks.

Still, there are enough good tracks to recommend this one, particularly "Before You Accuse Me", "Running On Faith" and "Lead Me On". It just doesn't make its way into my player very often, unlike, say, "461 Ocean Boulevard". . .

Eric Clapton is a true legend. An amazing guitarist, songwriter, singer, historian, and crucial member of several Hall of Fame worthy bands. I saw the Journeyman tour twice in 1989/90 and those were great concerts, and that may influence my opinion, he was on fire that year. Journeyman is a great Clapton album and I'd put it up there with Layla, the Cream albums, his self-titled "solo" album, and Slowhand. If you are a Claptonhead and don't have Journeyman, you should get it ASAP. Stinging blues, soaring pop, and the riff of bad Love is just awesome.

Standout tracks: Pretending, Bad Love, Anything For Love, Running on Faith, Before You Accuse Me

I have given this album "only" three stars, partly because of the slick, glossy 80s production by Russ Titelman which has completely removed any hint of real grit from these songs. They might as well have been played using synthesizers (actually most of the drums aren't drums at all but a digital drum machine).

The songs themselves are generally pretty good, though. They are not as lean, nor as muscular, as they could have been, but "Pretending" is a fine, mid-tempo rocker with some really great vocals by Eric Clapton. "Bad Love" suffers from terrible, overblown production and weird synthesizers, but it's not a bad song in itself, and "Running On Faith" is a slow, bluesy ballad with relative lean instrumentation and some nice slide dobro playing.
"Hard Times" is another slow blues, augumented by a horn ensemble, and Clapton actually does a pretty good, funky rendition of "Hound Dog".
"Run So Far" is a little masterpiece, written by George Harrison, who lends a hand playing guitar and singing harmony vocals. Nice, sparse arrangement there.

Clapton wrote "Old Love" with Robert Cray, and it works pretty well, too, without too much of the wall-of-sound treatment which has partly ruined "No Alibis", "Breaking Point" and "Anything For Your Love". And the album ends on a high note with some real, three-dimentional drumming from Steve Ferrone and Jim Keltner on the fine ballad "Lead Me On" and Bo Diddley's fiery blues classic "Before You Accuse Me" (albeit in a slick, less fiery version).

All in all, "Journeyman" is a good album. It could've been great, if a few more songs had been good instead of merely adequate, and if the production had been less 80s-like, but it is not one to be avoided by any means.